Beast Triad · Press kit
Across the five habitats, every rivalry is settled the same way: a deck of animal portraits and a 3×3 board. Place a card beside a rival’s, and if your number is higher, their card flips to your side.
Twenty-seven beasts from five habitats, eight rivals to defeat, and Same, Plus and Combo flips that can turn a lost board around in one move.
76 seconds · 1920×1080, 30 fps · captured from the game running in the Playdate Simulator, shown at 4× with the Playdate screen’s own grey tones · trailer.mp4
Beast Triad is an elegant animal card duel for Playdate. Play beasts on a 3×3 board, flip your rivals’ cards with higher numbers, and chain Same, Plus and Combo flips across five habitats.
From the Whispering Woods to the Golden Plains, the beasts settle every rivalry the same way: a deck of portrait cards and a 3×3 board. It is called a bout, and it is decided by numbers, nerve and the shape of the board.
Each card has four numbers, one per side. Place a card beside a rival’s card and compare the touching sides. Higher wins the flip, and the card turns to your color. When the nine spots are full, whoever holds more cards wins the bout.
Some spots are habitats. Set a hedgehog on Woods and every side gets +1. Set it on the River and it gets −1. Read the board, the icon in each card’s corner, and what your rival still holds. Then look for Same, Plus and Combo: matching or equal-sum sides flip several cards at once, and every card they flip can keep the chain going.
Take on eight rivals in the Campaign, from Bramble the hedgehog in the Whispering Woods to Queen Mane on the Golden Plains, and win a card from each rival’s hand. Fill your binder with all 27 beasts, tune your five-card hand, then take it to a Quick Bout, the Daily Bout, or hand the Playdate across the table for two-player Pass & Play.
All 23 screenshots are in screenshots/1x (native 400×240, pure black and white, exactly as the device draws them) and screenshots/4x (1600×960 in the Playdate screen’s grey tones).
Warm swung lofi-chip groove for the title and menus: flute-pulse hook, marimba replies, e-piano comping.
Driving funk duel theme: tresillo pulse hook, octave-popping bass, call-and-response bridge and a breakdown drop.
Final-rival remix of the duel theme at 140 BPM: four-on-the-floor, driving saw bass, phrygian boss riff.
Every sound is synthesized for Beast Triad and plays on the Playdate as 22 kHz mono samples. Previews are MP3.
A tiny 3×3 board is one of the best puzzles ever put on a card table: every move changes what your rival can do next. It also fits a Playdate perfectly, with a screen made for crisp cards and a crank that is happy to riffle through a hand.
The name is a nod to Triple Triad, the card game inside Final Fantasy VIII. A triad is a group of three, and a 3×3 board is three rows of three.
Beast Triad began as one question: what if the cards were beasts, painted like the portraits of an old card game? The roster, its numbers and its habitats grew from there. A hedgehog is strong on its sides and weak on top. A rabbit is quick on the left and careless everywhere else. An eagle owns the sky and nothing else.
The whole game is drawn for Playdate’s 1-bit screen: side-profile animal portraits with dramatic light and dithered shadow, card frames that grow richer up the food chain, and a royal interface of fine rules, crowns, fleurs-de-lis and a serif display face.
Tier I · Prey · 8 beasts
Tier II · Forager · 8 beasts
Tier III · Hunter · 6 beasts
Tier IV · Apex · 5 beasts
Pixel art is 1× at heart. Scale it by whole numbers only (2×, 3×, 4×) with nearest-neighbour sampling, so every pixel stays square.